Harold Pinter and Tracy Letts Revivals, and ISIS on Stage in London

LONDON — The British actor Timothy Spall hasn’t performed on stage in London in nearly 25 years, preferring to compile an impressive array of screen and television parts that hit a high in 2014 with his performance as the visionary artist of the title in the Mike Leigh movie, “Mr. Turner.”

But Mr. Spall seems determined to make up for lost time in the Old Vic revival of “The Caretaker,” the Harold Pinter play from 1960. Playing Davies, a toothsome fusspot of a vagrant, Mr. Spall lends the part so capacious an arsenal of sound effects and facial gestures that one half expects him to animate an entire Dickens novel all by himself.

An early and defining power play from the late Nobel laureate, “The Caretaker” finds Davies newly arrived at a down-at-the-heels London home that is at times the domain either of the damaged Aston (Daniel Mays) or his younger brother Mick (George MacKay). The events across three acts (and as many hours of playing time) leave open for reappraisal just who is the caretaker of whom.

I was fascinated at the start but eventually somewhat worn out by a star turn from Mr. Spall that is so relentlessly “on” that one tires after a while of physical business — a slack jaw here, attention-grabbing squint there — that detracts from the darkness at the heart of what has previously felt far more taut a play than Matthew Warchus’s production here suggests.

Those fearful of the silences for which Pinter remains renowned, fret not: Mr. Spall constitutes the production’s very own Energizer Bunny, and rarely does he come to rest.

A similar staginess undercuts Mr. MacKay’s grip on the initially grim-faced Mick; the actor has been allowed to turn several of the character’s longer speeches into breakneck verbal marathons calculated to earn applause. (Mr. MacKay was the lead in Mr. Warchus’s buoyant and undervalued 2014 film “Pride,” which is itself rumored to be making its way to the stage.) Such power as the play still musters devolves by default to Mr. Mays, who sublimates his own bravura tendencies to deliver an indelibly moving performance at gratifying odds with the manic flourishes on view elsewhere.

It is Aston, after all, who gets the lengthy monologue — vintage Pinter in every way — that ends the second act and that helps explain how he came to be the halting, indrawn presence we see before us. You exit for that intermission blinking back tears, only for the play soon after to reassert itself, most oddly, as a romp.

The blighted environment of “The Caretaker” seems downright luxurious by comparison with the Oklahoma motel room on view in “Bug,” the Tracy Letts play about a couple who come to share their seedy environs with the very critters promised in the title. Simon Evans’s expert revival is running through May 14 at the Found111 playhouse on Charing Cross Road, a space whose cozy auditorium — some might call it cramped — is accessed by climbing 71-steps from street level. There is no elevator.

First seen in London 20 years ago in a production that starred Michael Shannon (a 2016 Tony nominee for his role as Jamie in the current Broadway revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”), this lurid fantasia finds all sorts of resonances in the here and now. “We’re not safe … not on this planet … we will never really be safe again”: Those are among the anxious perceptions voiced by Peter (James Norton, very ably inheriting Mr. Shannon’s part), whose bad tooth soon gives way to the overriding feeling that he is being eaten — no, make that devoured — from within.

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Alec Newman and Daisy Lewis in “Bug” by Tracy Letts at Found111.CreditSimon Annand

The aphids are everywhere, it appears, and we have (just possibly) the government to blame. And guess what? You don’t have to trawl too far around today’s Internet to find contemporary equivalents to the rantings posited by “Bug.” (In the interim, of course, Mr. Letts has gone on to win Tony Awards both as the author of “August: Osage County” and as Broadway’s most recent George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; “Bug” became a 2006 film.)

Mr. Letts’s scenario clearly tilts toward the preposterous, but it’s the great strength of Mr. Evans, as director, and his cast to play the gathering distress for real, with Peter and newfound bedmate Agnes (Kate Fleetwood) united in their alarm. Humankind is further represented in the play by the ever-excellent Alec Newman as Agnes’s abusive ex and Daisy Lewis as a lippy lesbian who remains adamant that the mounting sores are self-inflicted; no conspiracy theorist there.

In fact, no one but first Peter and then Agnes can beat back the betrayal they are experiencing courtesy of their own flesh, their vermin emblematic of less obvious infestations — Peter’s mounting sense of dread, for one, positing its own untreatable itch. (Nor is it long before Edward Lewis’s soundscape is mounting its own separate assault.)

By play’s end, the couple are rabidly at work ripping up the carpet and peeling back the wallpaper of Ben Stones’s set, as if searching for physical proof of a psychosis that they have come to share. As for their physical condition come the curtain call? Let’s just say that the leading players doubtless need a good long shower to wash themselves clean, though the sweet-faced Mr. Norton’s broad grin at the bows suggests that the nightly sweat and blood — stage blood, to be sure — are worth it.

Saturday is the final day of a play on the topic of terrors that are all too much with us — “Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State,” directed by Nicolas Kent and based on the verbatim testimony of men and woman affected by or engaged in various ways with the goings-on of the Islamic State.

A 13-strong cast encompasses a cross-section of real-life figures, ranging from Western diplomats and military personnel to British Muslim students, the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the British citizen and former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg. Absent, no doubt inevitably, is any sustained testimony from Islamic State recruits from Britain and elsewhere, whose increased numbers are what led Mr. Kent and the playwright Gillian Slovo to devise the play in the first place.

Is the distillation of many hours of taped interviews into 90 minutes inherently dramatic, or are we merely watching a history lesson in three dimensions? Individual playgoers will have their own views on that. But when the imparting of information gives way to the sorrowful accounts of three mothers from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, their lives upended by a radicalism in their children that they cannot begin to comprehend, a theater auditorium seems a welcome place in which to register and respond to a family’s grief.

This production, as it happens, marks the last-ever show to occupy the National Theater’s temporary space, which will soon be torn down as has long been planned. I’ll miss this pop-up address and the scrappy, feisty work it has hosted over the past three years. The cataclysms monitored in “Another World,” meanwhile, remain, the ravages of the Islamic State bound to feature afresh in art as, alas, they do in life.

The Caretaker. Directed by Matthew Warchus. Old Vic Theater. Through May 14.

Bug. Directed by Simon Evans. Found111. Through May 14.

Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. Directed by Nicolas Kent. National Theater’s temporary theater. Through May 7.

Correction:

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of one of the actors. He is Daniel Mays, not Hays. The caption also transposed the positions of Mr. Mays and George MacKay in the picture; Mr. Mays is in the center, and Mr. Mackay is at left.